The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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remembering

Nowadays, thats typically the response I hear when I ask someone a question. Why is that? Neuroscientist Ian Robertson recently polled 3,000 people and discovered younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal information. 87% of his respondents over age 50 couldn’t recite a relatives birth date, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. When Ian asked those under 30 their own phone number, at least one third of them had to take out their handset to remember.

The moral of the story here is that, humans are reaching a point where they no longer need to remember information but rather, machines are the ones who are storing the information that can be retrieved within a few keystrokes. I know I have asked a number of people some interesting questions and instead of providing what they thought was the answer, they merely tell me to Google it. Does this happen to you as well? Leo Laporte likes to coin this term as (GAM) or Google Assisted Memory. As long as he can remember how to type into Google, he will seemingly never forget anything.

Although typing into Google and receiving those results is a very fast way of obtaining information, sometimes I just want to hear the answer from a human rather than a search engine.

I’d be very interested to hear your feedback regarding this subject as I think it is fascinating. In retrospect, it sounds like the beginning of the cyborg era, wouldn’t you say?

Nowadays, thats typically the response I hear when I ask someone a question. Why is that? Neuroscientist Ian Robertson recently polled 3,000 people and discovered younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal information. 87% of his respondents over age 50 couldn’t recite a relatives birth date, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. When Ian asked those under 30 their own phone number, at least one third of them had to take out their handset to remember.

The moral of the story here is that, humans are reaching a point where they no longer need to remember information but rather, machines are the ones who are storing the information that can be retrieved within a few keystrokes. I know I have asked a number of people some interesting questions and instead of providing what they thought was the answer, they merely tell me to Google it. Does this happen to you as well? Leo Laporte likes to coin this term as (GAM) or Google Assisted Memory. As long as he can remember how to type into Google, he will seemingly never forget anything.

Although typing into Google and receiving those results is a very fast way of obtaining information, sometimes I just want to hear the answer from a human rather than a search engine.

I’d be very interested to hear your feedback regarding this subject as I think it is fascinating. In retrospect, it sounds like the beginning of the cyborg era, wouldn’t you say?